In the Republic of Moldova some 309,000 people are either employers or own account workers (self-employed without employees). Only 120,000 of these (39 per cent) are women. Currently, this is the closest we can come to measuring the phenomenon of entrepreneurship, which in fact is a much more nuanced concept: some of those 309,000 are not entrepreneurs, and some entrepreneurs are not counted among that number. Entrepreneurs are those who generate value through the creation or expansion of economic activities, who innovate, who take risks, and who identify and market new products, processes and services. Many UNECE member States lack the necessary data to quantify these concepts and have to make do with employment status as the best available measure.

Gender differences in the numbers and types of entrepreneurs reflect gender inequalities in many areas: business rules and regulations; social resources and constraints; and the aspirations and motivations of individuals who wish to become entrepreneurs. Empowering women to become entrepreneurs can help to reduce poverty and can better enable women to make valuable contributions to their communities, families and economies.

But improving the conditions for women entrepreneurs depends on us knowing how many there are, what they do, how they do it, and what challenges they face. In the Beijing Platform for Action, countries have agreed to foster women’s access to self-employment and entrepreneurship, but data for differentiating entrepreneurs by sex are scarce, making it difficult to monitor progress and to design targeted policy measures.

These statistical challenges were the subject of a capacity-building workshop on developing entrepreneurship statistics by gender in the Republic of Moldova, held last week in Chisinau. A United Nations joint project on strengthening the Moldovan national statistical system aims to harmonize official statistics with international standards and to improve the availability, quality, and use of disaggregated statistical data for participatory policy-making.

Participants from a broad spectrum of ministries, government agencies, business associations, academic institutions and civil society organizations learned about the use of business registers, enterprise surveys and household surveys for producing statistics on women’s entrepreneurship, shared their experiences in data usage, and discussed proposals for improving the collection of data and production of statistics.

UNECE and the United Nations Statistics Division will support the National Bureau of Statistics of the Republic of Moldova in conducting a pilot study to test a survey module for measuring entrepreneurship from the gender perspective in the Republic of Moldova during the second half of 2015.

The training workshop was organized by UNECE, UNDP, UN Women and the National Bureau of Statistics of the Republic of Moldova, with funding from UNFPA

The Republic of Moldova is one of the target countries of the project ‘Interregional cooperation to strengthen national capacities to measure progress in achieving gender equality and women’s empowerment’, financed from the United Nations Development Account

Data on women’s entrepreneurship, as well as many other indicators of gender equality for UNECE member States, can be found in the UNECE statistical database at www.unece.org/data.